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These are my notes on howto install OpenVPN 2 on CentOS 6, more specifically OpenVPN 2.3.2 on CentOS 6.5. My notes build on the DigitalOcean community guide and are accurate as of 25 April 2014. The guide was a helpful starting point but I’ve managed to shorten a couple of the steps and updated some to take into account directories having moved, etc.

To start off you need to be on the console of the server you wish to run OpenVPN on. I ran all of these commands as the root user, you may need to su or sudo as necessary.

From time to time technology is a real pain in the backside. We’re all more reliant on it than we’ve ever been before and when it goes wrong these days, generally it means you’ll end up suffering. Storage failure is always the worst kind of technology issue because it generally means losing something that’s important to you, e.g. family photographs.

Today though in a first for me, storage failure reared its ugly head but was slapped down by FreeNAS. Keeping a long story short, one dying drive + one next day delivery replacement drive + one set of FreeNAS wiki instructions = No need to restore from backups and NO LOSS OF DATA!

Now whilst some people might attribute all this to the components that make up FreeNAS (e.g. FreeBSD, ZFS) without the work done by the FreeNAS team to wrap these all up in a friendly, usable package, surviving a storage failure like this would have remained a pipe dream for me.

It’s funny sometimes the way the world works. I’d been trying to push myself into getting started with DDP Yoga since I ordered it just before Christmas 2013 but had struggled to get myself up off the ground.

January has always been a bit of an awful month in terms of past events and I’d not realised until today just how much looking back on things can take the wind out of your sails.

So, with my Mum’s 61st birthday meal having come and gone yesterday, today was the day I finally got myself up off the ground.

All I can say is, I was pretty sure that I was unfit before, now I know! Oh well, onwards and upwards!

It’s an awful cliché but the video is right, you have to start somewhere!

So, earlier today I noticed that my Nexus 5 running Android was saying “No account is currently storing backed up data” in the Settings -> Backup & reset menu. Having searched on Google for a solution, most everything I’ve come across recommends force stopping various services on the device or doing a factory reset.

Well, if you get this problem, do not do either of those things. Simply remove all of your Google Accounts (Settings -> Accounts -> Google) until no Google accounts remain, then restart your device. When it reboots it should complain that you have no backup account. Sign into your Google account and voilà, problem solved and without the painful data loss you might suffer with a factory reset.

Here are my instructions for creating a FreeNAS Jail with Bittorrent Sync (BTsync) running inside it. This uses no FreeNAS plugins whatsoever and takes full advantage of all the power that comes with having a FreeBSD core running at the heart of FreeNAS 9.1. This has been done on FreeNAS-9.1.1-RELEASE-x64.

Login to your FreeNAS systems web interface.

Click: Jails

Click: Add Jail

For Jail Name use btsync and click ok. Let FreeNAS do its thing.

The jail will automatically start. You now need to SSH into your FreeNAS box as root. In the alternative SSH in as a regular user and then change to root with su.

Run: jls

Make a note of the number to the left of the btsync name used earlier.

You can use the FreeNAS admin interface to mount storage into folders that exist outside of the jail into the jail.

Files and folders should all be set to nobody:nogroup as a user/group combination. This killed off 99.9% of problems I was having.

Bittorrent Sync does not seem to update itself at the moment, at least it hasn’t thus far in this configuration. This could be because it just doesn’t do it on FreeBSD or because I’ve done something stupidly wrong. Either way you’ll have to watch the version numbers.

Hopefully this will lead to some serious fun experimenting which will let me separate my current jail (which contains Serviio and other applications) into separate compartments that I can then turn on and off as necessary.